I love Linode for their straightforward pricing. I can use them for temporary infrastructure and not have to worry about getting overcharged. When it comes time to transfer infrastructure back, the process is fairly straightforward. In my case I wanted to keep a disk image of my Linode VM for future use.

The linode documentation is very good. I used their copy an image over ssh article combined with their rescue and rebuild article sprinkled with a bit of gzip compression and use of pv to grab my linode image locally, complete with a progress bar.

First, boot your linode into recovery mode via dashboard / Linodes / <name of your linode>, then click on Rescue tab, map your drives as needed.

Launch console (top right) to get into the recovery shell. In my case I wanted to SSH into my linode to grab the image, so I set a password and started the ssh service:

passwd
/etc/init.d/ssh start

Then on your end, pipe ssh , gzip, pv and dd together to grab the compressed disk image with progress monitoring:

ssh root@ "dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -1 -" | pv | dd of=linode-image.gz

Success.